The lottery is a game of risk, adrenaline, and pure luck.
Luckily, the Mega Millions Jackpot is currently at a wild 1.6 billion dollars. In order to win, one must buy a lottery ticket with all five of the correct numbers, and the correct Mega Ball number to win the massive pay day.
The numbers pulled so far, according to NBC Chicago on October 19th, were 15, 23, 53, 65, 70 and Mega Ball 7. Two tickets from Illinois with the first five correct numbers were drawn, giving each winner a hefty one million dollar prize.
Yet, all the numbers, including the Mega Ball, have not yet been pulled.
To top it all off, the chances of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302.5 million! Easily, it’s more probable to get struck by lightning than to win the lottery.
So, I got to thinking of what I would do with all that money if I hypothetically won the lotto.
For starters, I could give to charity and make the world a little better of a place to live.
Or, I could help friends and family fulfill their dreams. I could invest huge sums of money and hopefully profit more, or I could just build a castle out of dollar bills and live in it.
Realistically however, I would pay off my student loans.
Not everyone has student loans, and even the particular amount of loans one has to take out can differ from person to person. However, the student loan crisis is astonishingly frightening in this country. To give an idea of how bad the crisis is, the estimated loan balance for the nation is set to reach two trillion dollars by 2022. College is so expensive because of the lack of government funding in public institutions.
In private institutions, like Saint Xavier University, the research done by professors, facility maintenance, and running the university.
These are obviously only the tip of the iceberg of reasons college is so expensive, but college needs to be more inexpensive for the sake of a student’s education.
Research from The Atlantic finds that many lower-income families with college- age students do not have their children apply to any schools because they cannot afford it.
This is a sad reality many people face. There are initiatives to help offset this factor, such as some colleges offering almost full-tuition scholarships and grants to lower-income families.
This is a great start, yet the student loan crisis keeps rising.
FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) should give out more grants and aid to students.
In the 2017 school year, graduates left 2.3 billion dollars in federal aid untouched from not filling out the FAFSA.
Every student should fill out the FAFSA and take any aid they can get. In return, the government should set aside extra money in the budget towards federal aid.
This could be done by raising taxes, and yes I know most people hate that.
But the trade off is this: you can pay for a well-educated society now, or deal with the non-productive society who lacks knowledge in the future.
Overall, if I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is pay off my student loans, and maybe even pay off a few other people’s loans as well.
Until that day though, I will be filing my FAFSA and continuing with my education so I can have a bright and brilliant future.
Emily Rubino
Opinions Editor